User Experience 35-42
NOTES! WHICH YOU HAD BETTER READ ALL THE WAY TO THE END OR MISS AN EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT!
- Lady Lovelace to her mother, 1843: “I had better continue to be simply the High-Priestess of Babbage’s Engine, & serve my apprenticeship faithfully therin”
- Lady Lovelace to Charles Babbage, 1848: “You say nothing of Tic-tac-toe– in yr last. I am alarmed lest it should never be accomplished. I want you to complete something.”
- Calumny! Victorian writers were not paid by the word, they were paid by the page. Though sometimes one wonders if they were paid by the syllable. And the median length is indeed 168000 words, thanks Wikipedia!
- the long corridor of teeth Lovelace walks down is the Rack, the part of the Analytical Engine designed to transfer the data from the Mill to the Store. Babbage’s son put together a model of it:
I have no real idea but I guess in principle it works like– the Engine engages the Rack, zeros out the wheel in the Mill, which moves the units to the Store? Or something. Apparently the punchcards control the engagement of the rack. Somehow. Jonesin’ for some diagrams, Analytical Engine people!
–Lovelace is quoting the Faery Queen there- poetry! She and Babbage called her ‘the Faery’ sometimes, I think they meant that kind not the Tinkerbell kind.
Sith thou misdeem’st so much of things in sight?
What though the sea with waues continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all:
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought,
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.
Likewise the earth is not augmented more,
By all that dying into it doe fade.
For of the earth they formed were of yore;
How euer gay their blossome or their blade
Doe flourish now, they into dust shall fade.
What wrong then is it, if that when they die,
They turne to that, whereof they first were made?
–I am much indebted to Language Log for “Strip my gears and call me shiftless”– I knew I wanted one of what LL is pleased to call the ” and call me “ constructions, and that one shall we say meshed with my needs. My googling skills were not up to tracing how far back these go though, and it’s certainly an Americanism, but Lady Lovelace is Cosmopolitan.
AND FINALLY..
Lovelace and Babbage VS the Organist– coming to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
Keep an eye on intrepid sound-designer Fiona Keenan’s blog for the process!
Needless to say I am incredibly excited!
I’ll put up the dates when I have ‘em..
Oh oh one last thing.. you’ll never guess who dropped by with a comment on the page with the Zork gags.. I may indeed say with George, “Pleasant letters like yours are the best possible stimulus to an author’s powers.”
